Work Text:
Rory Keaner has a type. Boys with dark hair and trustworthy eyes. Boys whose minds race a mile a minute, and are impossible to keep up with. Boys who feel like an adventure. Boys who don’t care about anyone other than themself. Boys who use people to get what they want. Boys who get bored easily. Boys who don’t look back. Boys in bands.
Jesse Black was the first boy Rory fell for. Rory was young and naive. He saw that and used it to his advantage. He was the bassist for some indie band that only makes songs about drugs and sex. The kind of band Rory was obsessed with. He saw Rory as a game to be won. Everytime they were together, he would take it as a challenge to push Rory to do something they wouldn’t do on their own. Rory would falter when they thought things were going too far. But he would smile at them. He’d kiss them. He’d make Rory feel safe, against all logic. Rory didn’t want to disappoint him, so they went through with it. Every. Time. He took pleasure in ripping down Rory’s boundaries. He got them to a point where there was nothing they wouldn’t do for him. He played around with that for a while, but he didn’t find it exciting. He left them. He didn’t respond to any of Rory’s texts. When Rory showed up at one of his band’s shows, he pretended they didn’t exist.
He left the door wide open for David Stachowski to sweep in. He was the lead singer for an alt band that made depression it’s aesthetic. He was different, and Rory thought that made him better. He wanted Rory to hurt him. He wanted to think he was in love with Rory, and he wanted Rory to crush his heart into a million little pieces. He didn’t care how it happened, he just wanted Rory to be awful. He saw himself as good. He saw himself as a punching bag for his partners, and when Rory didn’t hit, he got mad. He took it upon himself to show Rory how a punching bag is supposed to be used. With bloody knuckles, he realized that Rory wasn’t going to give him what he wanted. He realized that while he ran around pretending to be in love with them, they had actually fallen in love with him. He got scared. He broke up with Rory and ran back to his ex so that she could make him feel like the victim again.
After him, Rory swore they wouldn’t date boys in bands anymore. But it’s not like they knew that Benny Weir was in a band when they started dating. As it turns out, he was in a hyperpop band with his best friend. Rory was weary of where their relationship would go, so they told him about their past relationships with boys in bands. He was able to convincingly reassure them that he wouldn’t do anything like that to them. Rory was more tentative now of labelling their feelings as love, but that was undeniably what they felt. He was kind, and caring, and he paid attention to Rory’s feelings. He was careful with them because they were trying to rebuild their boundaries, not because he thought they were delicate. The only thing Rory had to complain about their relationship was that about once a month he would fly out to play for a music festival, and Rory couldn’t go. Rory knew he wasn’t the kind of guy to hook up with some random person when his partner wasn’t around, so they didn’t worry. As it turns out, Rory should’ve been worrying about Ethan Morgan. He had been best friends with Ethan for longer than either of them could remember. Ethan thought that they were part of some epic slow burn romance that just had to culminate when he had a partner. He had been waiting on Ethan his entire life and Rory was just the person he was dating. It was obvious that he felt bad for what he did to Rory, but the damage had already been done.
A blonde girl with fake fangs, the drummer of Rory’s new favorite band, caught their eye and winked.